Contact centers, such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched interactions and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming interactions. Contact centers distribute interactions, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. Typically, when an interaction is received in a contact center, an IVR, human agent, or some other resource collects information pertinent to the interaction for use in routing the interaction.
The workflow routing engine directs contacts to various agents based on algorithms and predetermined criteria as described above. Typically the criteria for servicing the interaction from the moment the contact center becomes aware of the interaction until the interaction is connected to an agent are customer-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator or manager of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring for calls, or through complex programmable workflows that determine the right agent based on various predetermined criteria. Normally predetermined criteria include agent skills, interaction requirements, media type and availability of an agent, expected contact wait time, customer identity, customer class membership, relatedness to other customer communications (e.g., threads), previous interaction history, etc. Generally, skills-based routing is employed in which the ACD identifies all predefined interaction-handling skills of the agent and delivers to the agent the interaction that matches the agent's highest-priority skill. If the interaction is document-based (e.g., email, fax, Short Message Service or SMS message, instant message, etc.), the matching can also be done based on analyzing the interaction's content via natural language processing of the content to determine the topic and then routing the interaction to an agent deemed the Subject Matter Expert or SME for that topic. Commonly, the only conditions that result in an interaction not being delivered are that there are no available agents for an escalated media type (in which case the interaction is queued to be routed to the next available agent) or that there are no interactions in the contact center to be delivered.
Although contact centers have very skilled agents at their disposal, it is often the case that a single agent cannot address or service every single question raised in an interaction. The contact center has chosen the best agent for the given interaction; sometimes however, there still exists a question that the chosen agent cannot answer. The agent is then required to transfer the interaction on to another agent who can answer that one question. When the interaction is transferred, the customer typically has to state information that has already been stated to the first agent. This transfer results in wasted time for the customer and decreases in contact center efficiencies. Additionally, when an interaction is enqueued as a result of the transfer, the servicing of the interaction depends on the contact center load, agent availability, and introduces unnecessary delays to the customer. This all occurs because the best agent could not address a small portion of the queries raised by the contact.
A number of examples can illustrate this problem. In one example, an agent has received an email because he is the Subject Matter Expert or SME for the first and second but not the third of the three queries. He therefore, must contact another SME for the third query. In conventional contact centers, the agent has the option of either placing a phone call to the second SME (consulting the second SME) and then reading out the email to provide the context (and possibly reading out all of the system generated suggested responses for that email so the second SME can assist the agent in selecting the correct response) or, in the worst case, actually transferring the email directly to the second SME (or to a queue associated with the second SME). The servicing of the email after re-queuing due to the transfer is a function of the contact center load, agent availability, and so on, and introduces unnecessary delays, all because the agent could not answer one of the three queries. It may also be possible that the second SME is not enabled for email and because of that agent's limitation in working with that particular media (e.g., the agent may have a low typing speed or is disabled), in which case it may get routed to another (third) agent who is only able to address two of the three queries (e.g., the second and third queries but not the first query).
In another example, an agent is handling a complex interaction by chat and requires the assistance of an SME. The agent has to consult or conference with the SME over a medium where the SME is “available”. Due to the length of the chat transcript and complexity of subject matter, the agent has determined that the interaction and subsequent escalation of the chat is too complex to convey orally to the SME over the phone, so the agent tries to transfer the contents of the chat to the SME. However, the SME may not be “available” for chat, either because that channel is already in use or because he/she is not enabled for chat. If this is the case the customer and agent now have to wait indefinitely until the SME becomes “available” for chat or have to locate another SME.
In a further example, an agent wishes to call a customer back in response to an email the customer escalated. The agent may call the customer back via a phone call. However, this phone call becomes a separate interaction within the agent's workspace that is not connected to the email that precipitated it. If the agent needs to consult an SME for any reason, the conference/consultation is essentially limited to the voice call made by the agent. The email may be too long and complicated to simply read to the SME over the phone. The SME is not able to view the original email and thus is acting as a consultant to the agent without the full view of the context of the interaction.
These problems can be exaggerated in a high email volume contact center, where agents prefer to call back the customer for faster servicing, which includes periodic consults/conferences with SMEs and other agents. Besides the inefficiencies introduced in the SME's inability to view the full context of the interaction, agents may in all likelihood dismiss the progenitor email with a disposition of “resolved over phone” or equivalent resolution status that the contact center may have defined. However, this fails to capture all of the events that led to this ultimate resolution status.
In yet another example, a customer has escalated a chat to query about an email he/she had sent some time earlier. The ACD routes the interaction to the same agent who currently owns the deferred email, since these two are related because they are from the same “originating customer”. There are two interactions dealing with the same subject matter, but they reside on two different media channels. If the agent needs to consult with an SME there is no good way to share the context of the chat and email with the SME, especially if the SME is consulting over a phone. The agent would have to read aloud the chat interaction then read out the email to offer the SME a full perspective of the interaction. This process is time consuming and tedious. Alternatively, if the agent could consult with the SME by chat he/she would still have to type in the contents of the email for the SME to view the context of the interaction. Furthermore, if the agent decides to transfer the interactions because he/she cannot handle some of the questions, it is possible that the interactions may go to different agents based on agent availability, agent skills, and routing decisions. If the interactions get separated upon transfer, efficiencies in handling those contacts have been lost, and inconsistencies in service may occur.
In still a further example, a customer has escalated a chat to query about an email he had sent previously. The customer record specifies the chat customer's email id to be customer@yahoo.com while the email sent by the customer was from his other account, namely customer@hotmail.com. This example differs from those above in that the hotmail.com account is not part of the customer record, and, as such, the workflow routing engine has no way to detect that this chat escalation is related to that email. Thus, though they may end up at the same agent's desktop, the engine has not detected that they are related. Both these escalations, however, carry the same topic of conversation, and thus have an inherent context associated with them.
In yet another example, an agent has received two emails from two different customers, including two different issues. The agent knows that the SME is knowledgeable in both of these issues and would like his help to resolve the issues. In this example, there is no inherent relationship between the two interactions but a grouping may be useful during a consult session to improve efficiency.
The foregoing examples reveal a number of problems in conventional contact centers. Every contact center confronts situations where the best or optimal routing for an interaction fails to direct the contact to agent whom is able to completely handle that interaction, and the agent will need assistance from an SME to service the contact. Based on the load on the contact center, SME's are often occupied on a particular channel but idle on another, and agents are unable to service an interaction because of the inherent limitations in providing a “context” across media types. This leads to inefficiencies in the contact center's ability to service the escalated interaction, because of delays of this nature imposed on the agents. There is also no vehicle to permit consults performed over a first media channel to readily provide to the SME information about a contact on a second media channel.
It is therefore desirable to enable efficient collaboration by providing a mechanism that allows an agent to quickly and efficiently address all issues that require collaboration with an SME, without actually having to transfer or conference the interaction back to the contact center queue.